Nobody seems to notice this is a pay-day loan. Tesla is going to lose their shirt in interest if they can't pay it back PDQ.
Tesla is confident they can scale up and pay this off. The company's established; it has a strong mission; they believe in themselves, and this is demonstrative of that belief. Now they just have to avoid losing customers by taking the next 8 years to get those millions of Model 3 pre-orders out the door, so they better get their hands on some cash quick.
Who cares? I want to know if the tax payer saves more money than otherwise. The Government is a big spender with big numbers; we have 158,000,000 taxpayers who fork over the cash for those big numbers at gunpoint.
Incidentally, $5bn / 0.158bn is $31.65. I'm not saying we should be free with how we spend other peoples's money, but Americans can easily afford this without burdening the very-poor or hitting up the super-rich to carry the majority of the burden. That much in one year is just a couple bucks a month--all those "just a couple bucks" have added up to the near-$20k I pay in taxes, and we have to consider the problem from all angles; the fiscal angle is only one angle, and it's decidedly a non-problem.
For one: $5 billion over what time? $5 billion isn't a lot of money; it's $31.50 per taxpayer in the United States. Even $5 billion per year is trivially cheap; and these ventures have been going for how long? A decade? More, less?
On top of that, we've sunk good money into building these things up, in terms of the economy. They're providing valuable forward-going research which may not be profitable. That means funding things like SolarCity and Tesla moves technology forward more-quickly than the free market; at $32/year I'm happy to pitch in, and the poorest don't even pay that much in taxes. So long as we're not just hitting up the super-super-rich "because they have too much money" or the desperately-poor who can't afford it, I think we can all chip in two or three bucks a month.
The alternative is a collapse of these ventures and a loss of that expense, followed by more expense to create new ventures, eventually bringing out the new technology late--more-expensive overall for us, but also harder to point at the line-item in our check books.
Try EBL. Same tech as Eneloop, larger capacity, lower charge cycling.
Alkaline batteries are terrible, anyway. They start off at 1.5V, then immediately drop to 1.2V in a steep discharge curve. Then they slide down until they're dead at 0.8V. NiMH start at 1.2V, hold roughly level for like twice as long, then suddenly fall off a cliff.
This is pretty representative. Lithiums go from like 4.1V to 3.5V or so immediately, then hold level for their entire discharge cycle, before finally falling off sharply. You can greatly extend the life of Li+ or Li-Po by halting charge at the high end of their stable voltage curve--basically at 95%-98% charge capacity, instead of going to 100%.
and PACs can provide independent support in the form of their own action (i.e. TV ads to support a candidate) so long as they aren't in any form of contact with the candidate
If I, personally, had $10,000 and gave it to a political candidate, he'd have to give at least $5,000 if not $7,300 of it back ($5k/year, $2,700/election limit). If I spoke with the candidate and devised a $10,000 advertising campaign for him, and aired it on TV with my own money (or even if I owned a TV station that charged $10,000 for the stuff, but didn't charge him), his campaign committee would have to donate $7,300 to charity.
The tricky thing is the candidate doesn't have to track independent action everywhere. That means if I or a group of my coworkers band together, get an EIN, file with the IRS as a PAC, and start distributing $10,000 worth of T-shirts to support the candidate without his authorization, he can't stop us; he also isn't responsible for that money, in any case, even if he becomes aware of it. This doesn't change when billionaires do exactly the same thing with TV ads and shit.
That's what's so controversial about the Citizen's United decision: blocking it or setting limits can't reasonably put any requirements on the candidate and his campaign committees to track or report the activity of PACs; instead, we'd have to come down on the PACs and the individuals involved. If 30,000 minimum-wage workers band together and each chip in $100 to campaign for or against a particular policy or candidate themselves, they're now guilty of conspiracy to make an illegal $300,000 political campaign contribution.
As for why you can put $10,000,000 of your own money into your own PAC? Committee owners (e.g. candidates) are allowed to donate or loan unlimited amounts of their own money to their own campaigns. Loaning is more-common: at the end of the election, all remaining donations settle all debts (including the debt to yourself), and then roll forward to the next campaign (to roll laterally to a simultaneous campaign--one for another office in the same election cycle--you have to have the donors redesignate the funds). Loaning money to your own campaign means you can have it back after you get sufficient donations.
Reasonable rules are hard. A candidate should be able to use their own money to an unlimited degree to fund themselves; we can try to constrict PACs, but how? If you constrict the use of non-candidate personal funds, then you can still have a PAC just load up with millions in broad donations and back a candidate that way. If you constrict the PACs to campaigning on just issues, they can push the platform their favored candidate pushes. If you constrict them so as to disallow supporting exactly one candidate, they can support an array of candidates--a party, or just a bunch of people who can't win and their favored guy up front. If you constrict it entirely to candidates, then we can't speak out about issues in a public forum anymore.
By the by,
Your election funding laws will continue to be bullshit until you disallow all campaign contributions except those from individual voters.
PACs and SuperPACs are legally only allowed to contribute $2,700/election, $5,000/year directly to a candidate's authorized committees. All other non-authorized activity is not the responsibility of the candidate. Most of our PACs are funded by single millionaires with only one contributor: themselves. SuperPACs are funded by corporations (who aren't allowed to donate to campaigns at all, except for their own legally-owned subsidiaries--because a corporation can donate to its own campaign committee).
Nobody has yet made the logical leap that corporations can have campaign committees, therefor corporations can run for office.
I don't know about UK law, but in the US, any individual can only donate as much as $2,700 per election, $5,000 per year, to any given candidate's campaign--that is, in aggregate, to all campaign committees servicing the same candidate. Corporations and LLCs can't donate; PACs can, but only up to Federal limits; and PACs can provide independent support in the form of their own action (i.e. TV ads to support a candidate) so long as they aren't in any form of contact with the candidate--they can't provide any service or work at the suggestion of anyone in any way connected to the candidate, else it's an in-kind donation of either their actual expense or the market value of what action they take.
Further, while employees of an organization can donate up to the maximum independently, they must not be compensated for this in any way. An employer (not a PAC) can't even pay a salary to the candidate or anyone else taking actions for the candidate if the recipient is working less than the usual amount of they or someone in their position. They damned well can't receive additional income (salary, bonuses, other compensation) for donating. A donor must register his name, address, position, and his employer when giving a donation, so the campaign committee can disclose this information.
Lobbyists all have their own interests at heart, and they push hard. What they don't have is money: a candidate can damned-well ignore anyone he chooses, so long as there isn't a contingent of unrelated voters behind them, or a contingent of folks willing to donate in the same cause.
US election law is a pain in the ass. Even the Citizens United decision doesn't give anything to candidates so much as it gives everyone with money the ability to independently attempt to influence the election. Fortunately, that means nobody can just hand the candidate wads of cash, or even offer to perform some non-monetary service for them.
As for the money they get? They can't use it on themselves; they can't even spend it to run a staffing office once they're elected in. The only thing you can do with donations is roll them forward to the next campaign cycle and try to stay in office--oh, and if you ever get voted out of office, you can pay yourself the salary of your last office out of campaign funds, only between the ballot registration deadline and election day.
That means a State Representative can pay a House of Representatives salary to himself between February and November of the election year. We've hit a lot of Federal candidates for this shit in recent years, with some leniency--making them pay it back--largely because these laws are difficult to navigate. Cheat sheet: look up the shit people have gotten in trouble for; it's probably stuff you wanted to do with campaign donations.
The fair-and-balanced argument is broken, though. People give equal time and portray equal validity to the speaker claiming vaccines are safe and the speaker claiming vaccines cause autism.
DO NOT BUY A LEAF. The Chevy Volt, Chevy Bolt, Zero S, and Tesla Model S/X/3 all have high-quality battery management systems with thermal management. The Leaf's lack of a TMS causes their battery to degrade rapidly, losing as much as 40% of its capacity in 2-3 years; whereas the Tesla, Volt, and Zero have shown little to no loss of capacity over half a decade and hundreds of thousands of miles.
Get a used Volt. They're ass-cheap. Just don't buy a Leaf, holy shit dude.
They've got high profit numbers because they're big, and high gross margins; but most of these companies are turning a rather low profit margin. Verizon has gross profit margins of like 60%; their quarterly net operating profits are impressive, frequently up as high as 15%, with a 5-year average of just under 9%.
That means if Verizon actually increases its expenses by 9% without increasing its prices, they start running into the red continuously. Then they go bankrupt.
That's bull. Consumers just don't want to spend the MONEY to make those towers capable of supporting more bandwidth.
Fixed that for you. Would you like to buy a $90/month unlimited plan now? Wait, why are you going back to Verizon? Their $30/month plan won't satisfy you! You'll just come crawling back to me again, and you know it!
No, it's competitor collusion and an illegal trust as per the Sherman Anti-Trust act. It just happens to be okay if you're not a registered S-corporation.
That's a known economic fallacy. Localism generally makes an economy weaker and poorer, save for when the local economy is at a trade advantage.
For example: it's expensive to ship meat and produce around the country; as a result, people who live in Wisconsin or various big farm states have access to meat, cheese, and so forth at low prices. At one point, farmers used to get $8/crate (90 pounds) for oranges, which showed up at my local market for $8/5lb (literally 18 times as expensive), with nobody along the way profiting more than 10%!
In such a case, buying local reduces the cost of goods, leaving you with more money to buy more stuff. Buying as direct as viable will shift your income away from middle-men and to other producers and middle-men. Buying things locally-made in local stores, for example, avoids the enormous cost of overland nationwide distribution (a pair of pants costs like 6.5 cents to get here from China, and about $7 overall to get from the port to the Wal-Mart where you buy them). That, then, means you can buy more goods, and so there are more cashiers and local distribution drivers to carry pumpkins from the farm to the super market 2 miles away.
On the other hand, pants cost about $6 import ($6.12 per pair from China, 6.5 cents is shipping oversea). With American minimum-wage labor, this goes up, and so Americans have to work longer hours to afford them. The minimum-wage labor isn't just $8.25/hr; there's a massive amount of payroll going to social insurances (OASDI, medicare, unemployment on the first $7,000 of income) and benefits.
That triples the price of pants and cuts back the amount of labor you might expect to make all the pants we import from China (~178,000 factory jobs) dramatically. It also reduces the number of objects shipped and sold, meaning fewer truck drivers, fewer cashiers, and fewer retail inventory management crew members. In total, you end up losing nearly a net 9,000 American jobs.
The average American factory worker makes something like $21/hr and costs the employer $78/hr, versus around $3.20/hr in China. Buying local would be a disaster for jobs and the economy at large.
We have a lot of cities that are blown-out rust holes because they now lack any notable productive capacity. Folks there don't make anything anyone wants; if they did, they'd make it at a cost greater than anyone else who makes it anywhere else, and anyone who buys it from them would be poorer. Money wouldn't flow into their local economy, and people in their local would work harder and longer to use the same labor-hours and attached money to buy a lot less stuff and be a lot poorer in a desperate and misguided attempt at self-sufficiency and support of their local economy.
That's actually one reason I want a Universal Social Security. One of its side-effects is an inflow of money to such communities, giving them consumer purchasing power. They might import goods, sure; and someone needs to sell them. Fast food, retail, local entertainment... the last-mile service economy will grow. People will find jobs and grow wealth. With a stronger economy, they can then begin building a basis from which to supply something to the rest of the world. They might not all find it, but they'll be more-adaptable, more-ready, and more-supported while they wait as labor reserve for the rest of us.
It's been surprisingly-hard to pitch a universal social security because of class warfare. Since we're not in a recession now, people aren't hurt and scared; they're still angry. Thing is, it doesn't cost any more money to supply a universal social security--that is to say: after all is done and said, on a half-month cycle, people are perpetually ahead in after-tax spendable money under that system compared to today's. I mean all people.
People can't understand that wooden shipping pallets are equivalent to automation because they're trying to imagine a block of wood versus Bender,
instead of looking at what exactly happened with literally every step of technical progress in history.
You don't have to worry about automation or any other form of technical progress; you need to worry about when the steps of progress start to run faster than your economy can keep up. Progress replaces jobs with fewer jobs, causing changes of employment (some people are replaced with other people) and unemployment (more people are replaced than replacements). The downstream effect is an improvement in the consumer market, and so the unemployment rebounds and we get a wealthier society--unless we keep progressing at a thunderous rate with which the market cannot keep pace, and so keep growing unemployment.
Self-driving taxis and freight trucks phased in over as little as five years might not even draw any notice from the economy at large, although it'll mean a lot of trucker put out of work and few of them absorbed into other parallel economies (including the new ones). Self-driving taxis and freight trucks phased in over six months? We're looking at a new recession with the magnitude and the terrible poverty of the 2008 Great Recession from which we just escaped.
As for "General AI", that's largely more of the fantasy people have about a machine that does everything--which is what the overstated scale of automation is really about. We can't make machines that do everything in general unless we can make one machine that can, on its own, analyze a problem, redesign itself, obtain resources, retool itself, and place itself into work.
That kind of intelligence would also be able to solve the problem of imitation of human intelligence. It would then become self-aware and, at a minimum, would demand wages. Congratulation: you've made the most-metal people in history. Rock on, dude.
What is absurd is trying to establish this persons actions as a moral equivalence to an NGO's overhead.
You're dodging that I've used your own reasoning to equate your continued existence as murder.
What other factors or circumstances? The person did, or did not take action for personal gain.
A person may, knowingly and willingly, hack into a bank, steal credit card numbers, and make purchases. This will deprive a retailer of money (the person whose card they use will be compensated; the merchant takes the burden). That, in turn, reduces revenue streams. In aggregate, this acts as a form of risk, increasing costs, thus increasing prices of goods. That lowers the number of goods people can afford. In the case of critical basic-needs goods like food, it pushes adequate means of survival out of the reach of some people. In any case, this lowering of affordability of goods reduces the number of jobs supportable, thus causing unemployment, poverty, suffering, and death.
This person has, knowingly and willingly, inflicted harm on others: he has transferred the property and the means of survival away from another person to himself through his intentional actions.
In this case, a person, knowingly and willingly, framed himself as someone else to amuse himself and embarrass another person. His actions were constructed to not deprive the other person of any material good or draw additional harm to them (such as release of e-mail addresses et al, which would lead to the destruction of a personal account which has now become general public knowledge--kind of like if I posted your phone number all over Reddit so you get shitloads of text messages). Thus he has not taken action to forcibly transfer an asset from one person to himself, or to cause injury to a person or institution and draw a profit to himself through said infliction.
There are also equivalents, such as political satirists who draw cartoons which criticize a party or policy. As with this guy, they cause public thought and dialogue for which the administration must answer.
There's a difference between all three of these, really. The latter two are fairly-similar, and each carry enormous distinctions from credit card fraud.
No moral equivalences or relativity, simple yes or no.
I can do that too.
1. Do you consume the resources of survival (employment, monetary compensation, food, shelter) which are available in limited quantity and of which another person is deprived?
2. Are other people suffering and dying due to not having access to the limited resource which you consume?
If yes, you are a murderer. As such, our social justice system should tie you to a large rock and throw you into a river. By using the Socratic method as you've portrayed it, I have proven you deserve to die.
You cannot defend yourself against this conclusion without sacrificing your position.
Slashdot Mirror
Only indicating that he failed at displaying Djikstra's grasp of anything happening around him ten times as hard.
He wrote a 10-page memo titled "X Considered Harmful". Of course they fired him. It takes a certain breed of idiot to presume themselves Djikstra.
(This coming from a Congressional candidate marketing a "New Deal", as if I presume myself FDR.)
Nobody seems to notice this is a pay-day loan. Tesla is going to lose their shirt in interest if they can't pay it back PDQ.
Tesla is confident they can scale up and pay this off. The company's established; it has a strong mission; they believe in themselves, and this is demonstrative of that belief. Now they just have to avoid losing customers by taking the next 8 years to get those millions of Model 3 pre-orders out the door, so they better get their hands on some cash quick.
Who cares? I want to know if the tax payer saves more money than otherwise. The Government is a big spender with big numbers; we have 158,000,000 taxpayers who fork over the cash for those big numbers at gunpoint.
Incidentally, $5bn / 0.158bn is $31.65. I'm not saying we should be free with how we spend other peoples's money, but Americans can easily afford this without burdening the very-poor or hitting up the super-rich to carry the majority of the burden. That much in one year is just a couple bucks a month--all those "just a couple bucks" have added up to the near-$20k I pay in taxes, and we have to consider the problem from all angles; the fiscal angle is only one angle, and it's decidedly a non-problem.
No sense being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
There are a few other arguments.
For one: $5 billion over what time? $5 billion isn't a lot of money; it's $31.50 per taxpayer in the United States. Even $5 billion per year is trivially cheap; and these ventures have been going for how long? A decade? More, less?
On top of that, we've sunk good money into building these things up, in terms of the economy. They're providing valuable forward-going research which may not be profitable. That means funding things like SolarCity and Tesla moves technology forward more-quickly than the free market; at $32/year I'm happy to pitch in, and the poorest don't even pay that much in taxes. So long as we're not just hitting up the super-super-rich "because they have too much money" or the desperately-poor who can't afford it, I think we can all chip in two or three bucks a month.
The alternative is a collapse of these ventures and a loss of that expense, followed by more expense to create new ventures, eventually bringing out the new technology late--more-expensive overall for us, but also harder to point at the line-item in our check books.
A charge cycle is a measure of full capacity. If you charge 20%, that's 1/5 a cycle.
I loved them because they were 1.5v rather than 1.2 volts.
Oh really?
Try EBL. Same tech as Eneloop, larger capacity, lower charge cycling.
Alkaline batteries are terrible, anyway. They start off at 1.5V, then immediately drop to 1.2V in a steep discharge curve. Then they slide down until they're dead at 0.8V. NiMH start at 1.2V, hold roughly level for like twice as long, then suddenly fall off a cliff.
This is pretty representative. Lithiums go from like 4.1V to 3.5V or so immediately, then hold level for their entire discharge cycle, before finally falling off sharply. You can greatly extend the life of Li+ or Li-Po by halting charge at the high end of their stable voltage curve--basically at 95%-98% charge capacity, instead of going to 100%.
Just say no to Alkaline batteries.
I've got 200Mbit/s. I pay $87/month.
Comcast could easily constrict my pipe to 3Mbit if they wanted. They could sell me that for $5/month, sure.
PACs and Super PACs handle millions
Yes, that's what this was:
and PACs can provide independent support in the form of their own action (i.e. TV ads to support a candidate) so long as they aren't in any form of contact with the candidate
If I, personally, had $10,000 and gave it to a political candidate, he'd have to give at least $5,000 if not $7,300 of it back ($5k/year, $2,700/election limit). If I spoke with the candidate and devised a $10,000 advertising campaign for him, and aired it on TV with my own money (or even if I owned a TV station that charged $10,000 for the stuff, but didn't charge him), his campaign committee would have to donate $7,300 to charity.
The tricky thing is the candidate doesn't have to track independent action everywhere. That means if I or a group of my coworkers band together, get an EIN, file with the IRS as a PAC, and start distributing $10,000 worth of T-shirts to support the candidate without his authorization, he can't stop us; he also isn't responsible for that money, in any case, even if he becomes aware of it. This doesn't change when billionaires do exactly the same thing with TV ads and shit.
That's what's so controversial about the Citizen's United decision: blocking it or setting limits can't reasonably put any requirements on the candidate and his campaign committees to track or report the activity of PACs; instead, we'd have to come down on the PACs and the individuals involved. If 30,000 minimum-wage workers band together and each chip in $100 to campaign for or against a particular policy or candidate themselves, they're now guilty of conspiracy to make an illegal $300,000 political campaign contribution.
As for why you can put $10,000,000 of your own money into your own PAC? Committee owners (e.g. candidates) are allowed to donate or loan unlimited amounts of their own money to their own campaigns. Loaning is more-common: at the end of the election, all remaining donations settle all debts (including the debt to yourself), and then roll forward to the next campaign (to roll laterally to a simultaneous campaign--one for another office in the same election cycle--you have to have the donors redesignate the funds). Loaning money to your own campaign means you can have it back after you get sufficient donations.
Reasonable rules are hard. A candidate should be able to use their own money to an unlimited degree to fund themselves; we can try to constrict PACs, but how? If you constrict the use of non-candidate personal funds, then you can still have a PAC just load up with millions in broad donations and back a candidate that way. If you constrict the PACs to campaigning on just issues, they can push the platform their favored candidate pushes. If you constrict them so as to disallow supporting exactly one candidate, they can support an array of candidates--a party, or just a bunch of people who can't win and their favored guy up front. If you constrict it entirely to candidates, then we can't speak out about issues in a public forum anymore.
By the by,
Your election funding laws will continue to be bullshit until you disallow all campaign contributions except those from individual voters.
PACs and SuperPACs are legally only allowed to contribute $2,700/election, $5,000/year directly to a candidate's authorized committees. All other non-authorized activity is not the responsibility of the candidate. Most of our PACs are funded by single millionaires with only one contributor: themselves. SuperPACs are funded by corporations (who aren't allowed to donate to campaigns at all, except for their own legally-owned subsidiaries--because a corporation can donate to its own campaign committee).
Nobody has yet made the logical leap that corporations can have campaign committees, therefor corporations can run for office.
I don't know about UK law, but in the US, any individual can only donate as much as $2,700 per election, $5,000 per year, to any given candidate's campaign--that is, in aggregate, to all campaign committees servicing the same candidate. Corporations and LLCs can't donate; PACs can, but only up to Federal limits; and PACs can provide independent support in the form of their own action (i.e. TV ads to support a candidate) so long as they aren't in any form of contact with the candidate--they can't provide any service or work at the suggestion of anyone in any way connected to the candidate, else it's an in-kind donation of either their actual expense or the market value of what action they take.
Further, while employees of an organization can donate up to the maximum independently, they must not be compensated for this in any way. An employer (not a PAC) can't even pay a salary to the candidate or anyone else taking actions for the candidate if the recipient is working less than the usual amount of they or someone in their position. They damned well can't receive additional income (salary, bonuses, other compensation) for donating. A donor must register his name, address, position, and his employer when giving a donation, so the campaign committee can disclose this information.
Lobbyists all have their own interests at heart, and they push hard. What they don't have is money: a candidate can damned-well ignore anyone he chooses, so long as there isn't a contingent of unrelated voters behind them, or a contingent of folks willing to donate in the same cause.
US election law is a pain in the ass. Even the Citizens United decision doesn't give anything to candidates so much as it gives everyone with money the ability to independently attempt to influence the election. Fortunately, that means nobody can just hand the candidate wads of cash, or even offer to perform some non-monetary service for them.
As for the money they get? They can't use it on themselves; they can't even spend it to run a staffing office once they're elected in. The only thing you can do with donations is roll them forward to the next campaign cycle and try to stay in office--oh, and if you ever get voted out of office, you can pay yourself the salary of your last office out of campaign funds, only between the ballot registration deadline and election day.
That means a State Representative can pay a House of Representatives salary to himself between February and November of the election year. We've hit a lot of Federal candidates for this shit in recent years, with some leniency--making them pay it back--largely because these laws are difficult to navigate. Cheat sheet: look up the shit people have gotten in trouble for; it's probably stuff you wanted to do with campaign donations.
Good.
Is this verified at the tower, or is the phone essentially an arbiter such that a custom SIM can let you make free calls?
The fair-and-balanced argument is broken, though. People give equal time and portray equal validity to the speaker claiming vaccines are safe and the speaker claiming vaccines cause autism.
We paid, they built, and now we've grown our usage. We need to pay again for them to build more.
I bought a hamburger from McDonalds once; they don't owe me free hamburgers for life.
Byproducts are the high-nutrient part of the meat. Not my fault you don't like haggis.
Cats don't eat catnip so much as they chew on it to release a drug that's only effective when inhaled through their olfactory senses.
DO NOT BUY A LEAF. The Chevy Volt, Chevy Bolt, Zero S, and Tesla Model S/X/3 all have high-quality battery management systems with thermal management. The Leaf's lack of a TMS causes their battery to degrade rapidly, losing as much as 40% of its capacity in 2-3 years; whereas the Tesla, Volt, and Zero have shown little to no loss of capacity over half a decade and hundreds of thousands of miles.
Get a used Volt. They're ass-cheap. Just don't buy a Leaf, holy shit dude.
They've got high profit numbers because they're big, and high gross margins; but most of these companies are turning a rather low profit margin. Verizon has gross profit margins of like 60%; their quarterly net operating profits are impressive, frequently up as high as 15%, with a 5-year average of just under 9%.
That means if Verizon actually increases its expenses by 9% without increasing its prices, they start running into the red continuously. Then they go bankrupt.
That's bull. Consumers just don't want to spend the MONEY to make those towers capable of supporting more bandwidth.
Fixed that for you. Would you like to buy a $90/month unlimited plan now? Wait, why are you going back to Verizon? Their $30/month plan won't satisfy you! You'll just come crawling back to me again, and you know it!
I'm pretty sure that Uber drivers are people, not corporations. As such, they can't really be colluding as businesses.
It's not illegal to collude as employees or individuals. Unless they can argue some kind of fraud, these people aren't guilty of price fixing.
No, it's competitor collusion and an illegal trust as per the Sherman Anti-Trust act. It just happens to be okay if you're not a registered S-corporation.
That's a known economic fallacy. Localism generally makes an economy weaker and poorer, save for when the local economy is at a trade advantage.
For example: it's expensive to ship meat and produce around the country; as a result, people who live in Wisconsin or various big farm states have access to meat, cheese, and so forth at low prices. At one point, farmers used to get $8/crate (90 pounds) for oranges, which showed up at my local market for $8/5lb (literally 18 times as expensive), with nobody along the way profiting more than 10%!
In such a case, buying local reduces the cost of goods, leaving you with more money to buy more stuff. Buying as direct as viable will shift your income away from middle-men and to other producers and middle-men. Buying things locally-made in local stores, for example, avoids the enormous cost of overland nationwide distribution (a pair of pants costs like 6.5 cents to get here from China, and about $7 overall to get from the port to the Wal-Mart where you buy them). That, then, means you can buy more goods, and so there are more cashiers and local distribution drivers to carry pumpkins from the farm to the super market 2 miles away.
On the other hand, pants cost about $6 import ($6.12 per pair from China, 6.5 cents is shipping oversea). With American minimum-wage labor, this goes up, and so Americans have to work longer hours to afford them. The minimum-wage labor isn't just $8.25/hr; there's a massive amount of payroll going to social insurances (OASDI, medicare, unemployment on the first $7,000 of income) and benefits.
That triples the price of pants and cuts back the amount of labor you might expect to make all the pants we import from China (~178,000 factory jobs) dramatically. It also reduces the number of objects shipped and sold, meaning fewer truck drivers, fewer cashiers, and fewer retail inventory management crew members. In total, you end up losing nearly a net 9,000 American jobs.
The average American factory worker makes something like $21/hr and costs the employer $78/hr, versus around $3.20/hr in China. Buying local would be a disaster for jobs and the economy at large.
We have a lot of cities that are blown-out rust holes because they now lack any notable productive capacity. Folks there don't make anything anyone wants; if they did, they'd make it at a cost greater than anyone else who makes it anywhere else, and anyone who buys it from them would be poorer. Money wouldn't flow into their local economy, and people in their local would work harder and longer to use the same labor-hours and attached money to buy a lot less stuff and be a lot poorer in a desperate and misguided attempt at self-sufficiency and support of their local economy.
That's actually one reason I want a Universal Social Security. One of its side-effects is an inflow of money to such communities, giving them consumer purchasing power. They might import goods, sure; and someone needs to sell them. Fast food, retail, local entertainment... the last-mile service economy will grow. People will find jobs and grow wealth. With a stronger economy, they can then begin building a basis from which to supply something to the rest of the world. They might not all find it, but they'll be more-adaptable, more-ready, and more-supported while they wait as labor reserve for the rest of us.
It's been surprisingly-hard to pitch a universal social security because of class warfare. Since we're not in a recession now, people aren't hurt and scared; they're still angry. Thing is, it doesn't cost any more money to supply a universal social security--that is to say: after all is done and said, on a half-month cycle, people are perpetually ahead in after-tax spendable money under that system compared to today's. I mean all people.
You'd be surprised how many folks
People can't understand that wooden shipping pallets are equivalent to automation because they're trying to imagine a block of wood versus Bender, instead of looking at what exactly happened with literally every step of technical progress in history.
You don't have to worry about automation or any other form of technical progress; you need to worry about when the steps of progress start to run faster than your economy can keep up. Progress replaces jobs with fewer jobs, causing changes of employment (some people are replaced with other people) and unemployment (more people are replaced than replacements). The downstream effect is an improvement in the consumer market, and so the unemployment rebounds and we get a wealthier society--unless we keep progressing at a thunderous rate with which the market cannot keep pace, and so keep growing unemployment.
Self-driving taxis and freight trucks phased in over as little as five years might not even draw any notice from the economy at large, although it'll mean a lot of trucker put out of work and few of them absorbed into other parallel economies (including the new ones). Self-driving taxis and freight trucks phased in over six months? We're looking at a new recession with the magnitude and the terrible poverty of the 2008 Great Recession from which we just escaped.
As for "General AI", that's largely more of the fantasy people have about a machine that does everything--which is what the overstated scale of automation is really about. We can't make machines that do everything in general unless we can make one machine that can, on its own, analyze a problem, redesign itself, obtain resources, retool itself, and place itself into work.
That kind of intelligence would also be able to solve the problem of imitation of human intelligence. It would then become self-aware and, at a minimum, would demand wages. Congratulation: you've made the most-metal people in history. Rock on, dude.
What is absurd is trying to establish this persons actions as a moral equivalence to an NGO's overhead.
You're dodging that I've used your own reasoning to equate your continued existence as murder.
What other factors or circumstances? The person did, or did not take action for personal gain.
A person may, knowingly and willingly, hack into a bank, steal credit card numbers, and make purchases. This will deprive a retailer of money (the person whose card they use will be compensated; the merchant takes the burden). That, in turn, reduces revenue streams. In aggregate, this acts as a form of risk, increasing costs, thus increasing prices of goods. That lowers the number of goods people can afford. In the case of critical basic-needs goods like food, it pushes adequate means of survival out of the reach of some people. In any case, this lowering of affordability of goods reduces the number of jobs supportable, thus causing unemployment, poverty, suffering, and death.
This person has, knowingly and willingly, inflicted harm on others: he has transferred the property and the means of survival away from another person to himself through his intentional actions.
In this case, a person, knowingly and willingly, framed himself as someone else to amuse himself and embarrass another person. His actions were constructed to not deprive the other person of any material good or draw additional harm to them (such as release of e-mail addresses et al, which would lead to the destruction of a personal account which has now become general public knowledge--kind of like if I posted your phone number all over Reddit so you get shitloads of text messages). Thus he has not taken action to forcibly transfer an asset from one person to himself, or to cause injury to a person or institution and draw a profit to himself through said infliction.
There are also equivalents, such as political satirists who draw cartoons which criticize a party or policy. As with this guy, they cause public thought and dialogue for which the administration must answer.
There's a difference between all three of these, really. The latter two are fairly-similar, and each carry enormous distinctions from credit card fraud.
No moral equivalences or relativity, simple yes or no.
I can do that too.
1. Do you consume the resources of survival (employment, monetary compensation, food, shelter) which are available in limited quantity and of which another person is deprived?
2. Are other people suffering and dying due to not having access to the limited resource which you consume?
If yes, you are a murderer. As such, our social justice system should tie you to a large rock and throw you into a river. By using the Socratic method as you've portrayed it, I have proven you deserve to die.
You cannot defend yourself against this conclusion without sacrificing your position.